Fiction Books

CHAPTER I.HOW I FIRST MET WITH CAPTAIN COFFIN.It was in the dusk of a July evening of the year 1813 (July 27, to be precise) that on my way back from the mail-coach office, Falmouth, to Mr. Stimcoe's Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen, No. 7, Delamere Terrace, I first met Captain Coffin as he came, drunk and cursing, up the Market Strand, with a rabble of children at his heels. I have reason to... more...

THE POISONED PEN Kennedy's suit-case was lying open on the bed, and he was literally throwing things into it from his chiffonier, as I entered after a hurried trip up-town from the Star office in response to an urgent message from him. "Come, Walter," he cried, hastily stuffing in a package of clean laundry without taking off the wrapping-paper, "I've got your suit-case out. Pack... more...

WINDFALL Photos along a soft-centred walllike assorted chocolateswith prized centres,tiny miniatures--full portraitsthe young army major, for one,in battle fatigues come full family regalia. Mounting the staircase(tearing back the chocolate paper)shroud hand on the railing,pressuring the cherry liquidinto oozing burst of memory,the nectarine orange of a summer's day.Swing & garden loom into... more...

CHAPTER I The restaurant of the Grand Hotel in Rome was filling up. People were dining rather late—it was the end of May and the entertainments were lessening, so they could dawdle over their repasts and smoke their cigarettes in peace. Stella Rawson came in with her uncle and aunt, Canon and the Honorable Mrs. Ebley, and they took their seats in a secluded corner. They looked a little out of... more...

CHAPTERONE           He watched from the quarterdeck as the chain fed through the whitecaps of the bay, its staccato clatter muffled, hollow in the midday heat. Then he sensed the anchor grab and felt an uneasy tremor pass along the hull as the links snapped taut against the tide. The cannon were already run in and cooling, but vagrant threads of smoke still traced skyward through the scuttles... more...

Lines Sing on, sweet feathered warbler, sing!Mount higher on thy joyous wing,And let thy morning anthem ringFull on my ear;Thou art the only sign of springI see or hear. The earth is buried deep in snow;The muffled streams refuse to flow,The rattling mill can scarcely go,For ice and frost:The beauty of the vale belowIn death is lost. Save thine, no note of joy is heard—Thy kindred songsters of the... more...

I IN WHICH THE DESTINY THAT PLAYS WITH MEN MOVES THE PIECES ON THE BOARD Dust lay thick along the road that led through the very heart of the native quarter of Mangadone; dust raised into a misty haze which hung in the air and actually introduced a light undernote of red into the effect. Dust, which covered the bare feet of the coolies, the velvet slippers of the Burmese, which encroached everywhere... more...

In the decade from 1870 to 1880 a new spirit was stirring in the intellectual and literary world of Denmark. George Brandes was delivering his lectures on the Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature; from Norway came the deeply probing questionings of the granitic Ibsen; from across the North Sea from England echoes of the evolutionary theory and Darwinism. It was a time of controversy and... more...

CHAPTER I MINOR POETS OF THE SOUTH The first poetic writer of this country had his home at Jamestown. He was GEORGE SANDYS who came to Virginia in 1621, and succeeded his brother as treasurer of the newly established colony. Amid the hardships of pioneer colonial life, in which he proved himself a leading spirit, he had the literary zeal to complete his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which... more...

PREFACE The first edition of this book appeared in 1905. That edition is exhausted,—an evidence of the great present-day interest in the woman’s rights movement. This new edition takes into account the developments since 1905, contains the recent statistical data, and gives an account of the woman’s suffrage movement which has been especially characteristic of these later years. Wherever the... more...